Privet-isation plan obscures wood with trees

How many woods would a deficit-cutter cut if a deficit-cutter had a chainsaw, an ideological obsession, some other unpopular cuts to bury, and very little by way of long-term planning skills? The latest UK coalition plan to be tabled is the selling off of England’s forests to prune back big government, and tackle the root of the national deficit.

The sell-off is promised to net us a cool, one-time windfall of £250 million from timber companies, equivalent to around a fiver per taxpayer, or 1/700th of the annual budget deficit. However, other planned leases are estimated by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to actually cost the government more than it will save, given the cost of fees and lost timber revenue.

The government promise to ensure our children can use the refashioned public spaces, comprising whirly-saw logging play areas and landfill sites full of AIDS, and that the beauty of these locations will not be impacted. So, given that you won’t be allowed to log it all and build a toxic waste factory or a kitten slaughterhouse, what’s the incentive to buy? This is setting brains awhirring over at Conspiracy Central, where rumours abound that the forest sell-off proposal is basically a smokescreen as large as if they’d just set fire to all the leafy bastards.

Some 89% of the public are preoccupied with saving Britain’s forests from privatisation, while 17% think that money doesn’t grow on trees, and the remaining 3% don’t know where money comes from, but like the smell of it. This gives the Tories a 9% public opinion surplus, which they can spend building hotels on their properties in Mayfair. And, more importantly, leaves 109% of people preoccupied with opposing a hilariously supervillainous plan to sell all the trees to kitten-hating, cloak-wearing, evil-doing corporate loggers, cement companies and private sector prison developers, and only three confused medical statisticians to take the coalition to task over its evidence-free battle to reform the NHS.

Who predicts an eventual avant-face, and the proud claim that the coalition are listening to the people with whom they’re all in it together*? Oh.